Quotes by Linus Torvalds - Page 5 | QuoteForever

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The big thing about distributed source control is that it makes one of the main issues with SCM's go away - the politics around "who can make changes." BitKeeper showed that you can avoid that by just giving everybody their own source repository.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Giving
Going Away
Issues
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When I do programming in my free time and for my own enjoyment, I really want to have a kind of protection: knowing that when I improve a program those improvements will continue to be available to me and others in future versions of the program.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Kind
Knowing
Want
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I'm sitting in my home office wearing a bathrobe. The same way I'm not going to start wearing ties, I'm also not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Home
Aggressiveness
Fake
Lying
Office
Passive
Politeness
Sitting
Ties
Wearing
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The thing I love about diving is the flowing feeling. I like a sport where the whole point is to move as little as humanly possible so your air supply will last longer. That's my kind of sport. Where the amount of effort spent is absolutely minimal.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Sports
Air
Diving
Moving
Flowing
Minimal
Supply
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Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen an angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Grace
People
Thinking
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Other people have other goals, and sometimes the BSD style licenses are better for those goals. I personally tend to prefer the GPL, but that really doesn't mean that the GPL is any way inherently superior - it depends on what you want the license to do.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Goal
Mean
People
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I was never a "big thinker". One of my philosophies in Linux has always been to not worry about the future too much, but make sure that we make the best of what we have now - together with keeping our options open for the future and not digging us into a hole.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Philosophy
Together
Worry
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Right now some people are just running around in circles and claiming that moving things to the kernel automatically makes it more stable. I'm telling you that the kernel is stable not because it's a kernel, but because I refuse to listen to arguments like this.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Running
Circles
Moving
People
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I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Trust
Data
Differences
Worry
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I try to avoid long-range plans and visions - that way I can more easily deal with anything new that comes up without having pre-conceptions of how I should deal with it. My only long-range plan has been and still is just the very general plan of making Linux better.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Long
Trying
Vision
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C++ is in that inconvenient spot where it doesn't help make things simple enough to be truly usable for prototyping or simple GUI programming, and yet isn't the lean system programming language that C is that actively encourages you to use simple and direct constructs.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Helping
Simple
Use
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I can't say that I like MicroSoft: I think they make rather bad operating systems - Windows NT is just more of the same - but while I dislike their operating systems and abhor their tactics in the marketplace I at the same time don't really care all that much about them.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Microsoft
Tactics
Thinking
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I've felt strongly that the advantage of Linux is that it doesn't have a niche or any special market, but that different individuals and companies end up pushing it in the direction they want, and as such you end up with something that is pretty balanced across the board.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Advantage
Balanced
Boards
Different
Linux
Niche
Pushing
Special
Board
Direction
Individuals
Strongly
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One of the questions I've always hated answering is how do people make money in open source. And I think that Caldera and Red Hat - and there are a number of other Linux companies going public - basically show that yes, you can actually make money in the open-source area.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Numbers
Thinking
Yes You Can
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I don't go to conferences quite as much as I used to: having a child and movin away from the university leaves me with less time, but I've tried to balance things out - not just spending time with Linux all the time, but having a real job and a real life at the same time.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Jobs
Children
Real
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If you have ever done any security work - and it did not involve the concept of "network of trust" - it wasn't security work, it was - masturbation. I don't know what you were doing. But trust me, it's the only way you can do security, it's the only way you can do development.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Development
Done
Way
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There were open source projects and free software before Linux was there. Linux in many ways is one of the more visible and one of the bigger technical projects in this area, and it changed how people looked at it because Linux took both the practical and ideological approach.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Approach
Bigger
Changed
Ideological
Linux
Open Source
People
Projects
Software
Visible
Way
Free
Free People More
Area
Open
Free Software
Looked
Practical
Took
Ways
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I'm a huge believer in evolution (not in the sense that "it happened" - anybody who doesn't believe that is either uninformed or crazy, but in the sense "the processes of evolution are really fundamental, and should probably be at least thought about in pretty much any context").
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Believe
Crazy
Fundamentals
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So I would not be surprised if the globbing libraries, for example, will do NFD-mangling in order to glob "correctly", so even programs ported from real Unix might end up getting pathnames subtly changed into NFD as part of some hot library-on-library action with UTF hackery inside.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Library
Order
Real
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Often your 'fixes' are actually removing capabilities that you had, because they were 'too confusing to the user'. GNOME seems to be developed by interface Nazis, where consistently the excuse for not doing something is not 'it's too complicated to do', but 'it would confuse users'.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Complicated
Confusing
Confusion
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Security people are often the black-and-white kind of people that I can't stand. I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys, in that they make such a big deal about concentrating on security to the point where they pretty much admit that nothing else matters to them.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Black And White
People
Thinking
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I'm simply too content doing what I want to do to really have a very negative attitude towards MicroSoft. They make bad products - so what? I don't need to care, because I happily don't have to use them, and writing my own alternative has been a very gratifying experience in many ways.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Attitude
Care
Writing
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I've been employed by the University of Helsinki, and that has been paying my bills. Obviously a ''real job'' pays better than most universities will pay, but I've been very happy with this arrangement I get to do whatever I want, and I have no commercial pressures whatsoever doing this.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Jobs
Real
Want
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I'd argue that everybody wants to do something that matters, and the fact that Linux has had a huge impact on the tech market and is used virtually everywhere is obviously very personally satisfying. I think programming is fun, and the community around the kernel is great, but a project has to be relevant too.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Fun
Impact
Thinking
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I've tried it a couple of times over the years, mainly because the thing Ubuntu did so well was make Debian usable. I always felt that Debian was a pointless exercise because to me, the point of a distribution is to make everything easy. Easy to install, to be pretty and to be friendly and Ubuntu did that to Debian.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Couple
Exercise
Ubuntu
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A lot of people want to have market share numbers, lots of users, because that's how they view their self worth. For me, one of the most important things for Linux is having a big community that is actively testing new kernels; it's the only way to support the absolute insane amount of different hardware we deal with.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Numbers
Self Worth
Views
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I have one very basic rule when it comes to "good ideas". A good idea is not an idea that solves a problem cleanly. A good idea is an idea that solves several things at the same time. The mark of good coding is not that the program does what you want, it's that it also does something that you didn't start out wanting.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Doe
Ideas
Want
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I often compare open source to science. To where science took this whole notion of developing ideas in the open and improving on other peoples' ideas and making it into what science is today and the incredible advances that we have had. And I compare that to witchcraft and alchemy, where openness was something you didn't do.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Science
Alchemy
Compare
Developing
Ideas
Improving
Incredibles
Notion
Open Source
Openness
Today
Witchcraft
Had
Advances
Open
Often
Making
Other
Something
Took
Where
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I'd like to point out that I don't think that there is anything fundamentally superior in the GPL as compared to the BSD license, for example. But the GPL is what I want to program with, because unlike the BSD license it guarantees that anybody who works on the project in the future will also contribute their changes back to the community.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Community
Guarantees That
Thinking
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I seldom get self-righteous, and even when I am being impolite (almost always on purpose - there's an art to insulting people, too), I tend to try to not be too serious about it. And most of the time it means that I can take criticism constructively, and sometimes just change my opinion on the fly and laugh at myself over having turned on a dime.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Art
Mean
Self
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Linux has more than satisfied any small initial expectations I had. It's simply incredible how successful Linux has been, and how good a time I've had developing it and leading the project. It does take a lot of my time, but it's time I really enjoy spending, and Linux has continued to be challenging both technically and from a managing standpoint.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Challenges
Expectations
Successful
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There's a few historical reasons for why git was considered complicated. One of them is that it was complicated. The people who started using git very early on in order to work on the kernel really had to learn a very rough set of scripts to make everything work. All the effort had been on making the core technology work and very little on making it easy or obvious.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Technology
Order
People
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I'm not a big believer in revolutions. What people call revolutions in technology were more of a shift in perception - from big machines to PC's (the technology just evolved, fairly slowly at that), and from PC's to the internet. The next "revolution" is going to be the same thing - not about the technology itself being revolutionary, but a shift in how you look at it and how you use it.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Technology
People
Perception
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In science, the whole system builds on people looking at other people's results and building on top of them. In witchcraft, somebody had a small secret and guarded it - but never allowed others to really understand it and build on it. Traditional software is like witchcraft. In history, witchcraft just died out. The same will happen in software. When problems get serious enough, you can't have one person or one company guarding their secrets. You have to have everybody share in the knowledge.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Guarding
People
Secret
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UNIX has a philosophy, it has 25 years of history behind it, and most importantly, it has a clean core. It strives for something - some kind of beauty. And that's really what struck me as a programmer. Operating systems that normal home users are used to, such as DOS and Windows, didn't have any way of life. Nobody tried to design Windows - it just grew in random directions without any kind of thought behind it. [...] I don't think Microsoft is evil in itself; I just think that they make really crappy operating systems.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Home
Philosophy
Thinking
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The Linux kernel is under the GPL version 2. Not anything else. Some individual files are licensable under v3, but not the kernel in general. And quite frankly, I don't see that changing. I think it's insane to require people to make their private signing keys available, for example. I wouldn't do it. So I don't think the GPL v3 conversion is going to happen for the kernel, since I personally don't want to convert any of my code. You think v2 or later is the default. It's not. The _default_ is to not allow conversion. Conversion isn't going to happen.
Linus Torvalds / Software Engineer
Keys
People
Thinking
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